Facebook suspended Donald Trump's account for 2 years.

Facebook has suspended President Trump's Facebook account for nearly two years, the company announced in a highly anticipated decision after months of debate over its future on social media.

Given the severity of the circumstances that led to Trump's suspension, we believe that his actions constitute a serious violation of our rules and deserve the highest penalty available under our new enforcement protocols.

Donald Trump


We suspend his account for two years on January 7th this year from the date of the original suspension, said Nicholas Clegg, Facebook's vice president for global affairs in a statement on Friday
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At the end of the suspension, Facebook said it would work with experts to assess the public safety risk posed by the reintroduction of Trump's account. We will also assess external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful gatherings and other signs of civil unrest, "Clegg wrote.

If we determine that there is a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the suspension for a specified period and continue the reassessment as soon as this risk decreases.

Clegg added, however, that the suspension will only be lifted if a series of tough, escalating sanctions are triggered and Trump violates Facebook's guidelines.
Friday's decision came after weeks of deliberation by the Facebook Oversight Board, an independent advisory panel made up of academics, media representatives and former politicians that had previously recommended that Trump's account not be reinstated.


The board has left the final decision on its fate to Facebook, giving the social media giant six months to make the final call. The new policy allows for rapidly escalating penalties for suspensions of one month, six months, one year and two years. Trump was suspended in January after a deadly attack on Capitol Hill in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The company suspended Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts for postings in which he seemed to laud the actions of the rioters, saying his actions posed too much risk to stay on the platform.

In a statement, Trump called Facebook's decision "an insult to the record 7.5 million people and many others who voted for us in the rigged 2020 presidential election.". After the Capitol riots, Trump was suspended from several major technology platforms, including Twitter and YouTube. Twitter made his ban permanent.

If they do not allow censorship and silence, we will win again. Trump received less than 75 million votes in the 2020 election, which he lost. He has hinted at a bid for 2024.
Facebook announced it would abandon its policy of treating political statements as newsworthy and exempt from enforcement its content rules, which prohibit hate speech, among other things. The move marks a major reversal of a series of policies that Clegg and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg have described as crucial for democracy and free speech.

Facebook introduced the exception to the newsworthiness of its content rule in 2016 after an international outcry over its decision to censor posts, including historic napalm girl photos, breached its ban on nude images of children. The exception acknowledged the importance of editorial judgment in Facebook's censorship decisions.
In a speech at the 2019 Atlantic Festival in Washington, Clegg revealed that Facebook had decided to treat speeches by political figures as "newsworthy" and exempt them from the content rules. It was acceptable to society at large that Facebook had effectively become a self-appointed arbiter of what politicians could say. "I don't think so," he said at the time.
The exemption for intelligence services is far from the only policy area in which we treat politicians differently from other users. We exempt politicians from fact-checking by third parties, maintain a list of high-profile accounts from which we are exempt, and have an AI system that we rely on to enforce many of our rules.

Under the new rules, Clegg wrote on Friday, Facebook would continue to assess content for newsworthiness, but would not treat content posted by politicians as if it had been posted by someone else. Facebook did not respond to questions about how long the policy will remain in effect.

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